Let’s see how I did with last year’s predictions. Results in red.
1. It’s litigation, baby! – Like parents shutting down a good party, expect the lawyers to come out in full force in 2006. Between privacy concerns, content rights, technology ownership and everything in between, lawyers will be busy throwing around the wet blankets.
Verdict: Like an iceberg, there was probably more going on under the surface than above, but we do know this: Craigslist said “no more” to the vertical job search engines spidering their content and Get The Job seems poised for a legal smackdown, biding their time for someone to strike it rich, a la Google dropping major “cabbage” on YouTube.
2. Acquisition – At least one of the vertical job search sites will be slurped up next year, most likely by a second-tier search engine like AskJeeves or Amazon’s A9.
Verdict: Get The Job acquired vertical search pioneer EmployOn and both SimplyHired and Indeed got chummy with some deep pocketed partners, but no one was acquired as predicted. Partnerships, in contrast, seem like the safer route for now, and I expect more high-profile connections to be made in ‘07.
3. Someone wake up Trumpasauras – Like a wounded animal, Monster will introduce a free posting option of some sort to fend off Google and Friends.
Verdict: They haven’t gone free, but deep discounts (wrapped in bait-and-switch tactics?) was apparently business-as-usual last year for keeping current customers, on the bubble about renewing, and naive prospects kicking the tires. Oddly, it looks as though Monster will be (or already has) raising prices on many packages in the new year.
Wild cards: Monster-owned Jobs.com currently offers job postings for a Craigslist-like $25 per job, and Monster-owned Flipdog is a project vertical that could go in a variety of different directions.
4. Recruiting.com vs. Electronic Recruiting Exchange – Blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, online education, desktop applications, MySpace meets LinkedIn, etc. hold a major opportunity for someone to create an online recruitment community the likes we’ve not really seen before and bring all these pieces closer together – and the dollars to follow. These two front-runners will be fun to watch in ‘06.
Verdict: Recruiting.com, riding the wave of its own acquisition by Jobster, is certainly not the “ah-shucks” Recruiting.com of 2005. And with Jobster getting so deep into social networking on its own site, does anyone doubt that Recruiting.com will integrate the same community format at some point, a la ERE? And with poker tournaments oddly looking more and more like conferences (or unconferences), is a more traditional “Recruiting.com Conference” (sponsored by Jobster, of course) far behind?
No. 4 may have been better as a prediction for ‘07, but the stars certainly began aligning in ‘06. Additionally, European powerhouse Onrec invading US shores has certainly made things that much more interesting. Is SHRM listening, I wonder?
5. The ol’ switcheroo – A major, nationally-known employer will be paid a very large sum of money by a job site to have exclusive rights over at least a portion of their job content. (Any recruiting managers looking to see their stock rise with upper management might want to highlight this point. Forget about saving money, bring in money.)
Verdict: Missed this one big time. But make no mistake: Employers, the real owners of the content everyone is using to get rich, hold the cards in a brave new world ruled by content owners. Someone, somehow, some way will eventually wake up employers to this fact and potentially turn the whole game on its head. And make a lot of money.
Or maybe not.
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